Accompanied with continual development of the electronic technology, various electronic products are becoming more and more versatile with overwhelmingly diversified functions. Therefore, innovated circuit designs of chips are also becoming more and more complicated in order to meet user requirements of the electronic products.
However, as techniques of reverse engineering of chip circuit layout advance, important circuit layout designs of many chips are exposed to crackers with improper intentions. For example, a cracker may first remove the epoxy encapsulating a chip using nitrate acid, cleanse the chip using acetone, deionized water or isopropyl alcohol, and then further etch away the various layers of metal. After removing the encapsulation of the chip, provided with enough knowledge on the routing of signals within the chip, the cracker is able to obtain information for reconstructing the structure of the chip through the focused ion beam (FIB) technique, or even connect signals that the cracker is interested in to the chip for further observation. As a result, certain crucial circuit layout designs in the chip may be cracked by ones with improper intentions, and may even by applied to illegitimate uses—this not only greatly jeopardizes rights of the owner of the circuit layout designs, but also seriously violates the relevant legislation that protects these circuit designs.
Therefore, it is an objective of the invention to provide a circuit protecting apparatus and an associated method, and a circuit protecting layer to overcome of foregoing issue.